R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world's population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.

We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted.

As long as one human being is hungry, the entire human race is hungry.

[A]ll the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous
tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming.

Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

Children will draw pictures with everything in them ... houses and trees and people and animals ... and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right." But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

You never change people by fighting their existing reality.

We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option to "make it" rather than having to depend on the decisions of an educated elite.

It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.

I'm utterly convinced that we are all here for one another and that every experience that everyone is having is relevant. It all counts. The Universe is so extraordinarily well designed that it needs all those experiences.

Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.

What has not been clear is that the potential of this emergency-born technology has always accrued to human's prewar individual initiatives taken in a humble but irrepressible progression
of assumptions, measurements, deductions, and codifications of pure science.

You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

Primarily the individual is going to study at home.

Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

The assumption is that the inevitability of a solution's realization is inherent in the interaction of human intellect and the constantly transformative evolution of physical universe.

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-
nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.

So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else's opinion, credo's and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth.

Dolphins may well be carrying information as well as functions critical to the regeneration of life upon our planet.

Controlled time is our true wealth.

Get ready the greatest new educational facility at the approximate dynamic population center of the North American continent

You can't better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy
to be effective must be mechanically applied.

Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

At first the, only subconsciously apprehended, approaching confluences of complex events make themselves known intuitively within the intellectual weather. Then comes a gradually awakening
consciousness of the presence of new families of differentiating-out challenging concepts of every day prominence. It is with these randomly patterning families of separate concepts that
evolution is about to deal integratively. As a now specific unitary problem it may be disposed of effectively when and if that unified problem becomes "adequately stated" and thereby
comprehensibly solvable.

I have great hope for tomorrow. My hope lies in three things-truth, youth, and love.

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.

Physics has found no straight lines. Instead, the physical universe consists of only waves undulating back and forth allowing for corrections and balance.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.

Life is the spirit incarnate in time.

We are operating at an overall mechanical efficiency of only four percent ... Therefore, we find that if we increase the overall mechanical efficiency to only twelve percent we can take care of everybody. That three-fold increase in the overall efficiency can only be accomplished by redesign.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

All children are born geniuses, and we spend the first six years of their lives degeniusing them.

Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing ... after they've tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked

There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.

By and large, I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.

All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently degeniusized by grownups.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia.

Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process.

Every child has an enormous drive to demonstrate competence.

It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.

We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth.

All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of no-where-nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.

The vector equilibrium is the zero point for
happenings or nonhappenings: it is the empty
theater and empty circus and empty universe
ready to accommodate any act and any audience.

Everyone is born a genius.

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

Our power is in our ability to decide.

I figure...

...that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and--each man by himself--of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing.

...that our contemporaries just don't wear their faith on their sleeves anymore.

...that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise--the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though eternally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance.

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

His Unique Selling Position was to make the world work for 100% of humanity.

The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.

We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively,sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth ... We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common.

There is enough for everyone. People think that there isn't enough, so they get as much as they can, so many people don't have enough.

You can make money or you can make sense. The two are mutually exclusive.

You can't change the way people think, all you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking.

Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction.

Humanity has the option to become successful on our planet if we reorient world production away from weaponry - from killingry to livingry. Can we convince humanity in time?

Don't change the man. Change his environment.

A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically.

Havenotness is caused by society's failure to design and produce the right tools and goods. Money alone is not the panacea.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider.

Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.

Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?

Don't try to make me consistent. I am learning all the time.

Nature does have manure and she does have roots as well as blossoms, and you can't hate the manure and blame the roots for not being blossoms.

The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?

One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage.

God is the great comprehensive a priori integrity of Universe within which human beings find themselves to be operating.

To do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

All sports are time control demonstrations ...

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary - the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab.

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.

You take the senses away, and there is no consciousness. Consciousness comes from experience.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

Bite your tongue. Get a cinder in your eye. When you feel good, you feel nothing.

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

The opposite of nature is impossible.

Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.

Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.